Contra Hanania on Foreign Policy

U.S. foreign policy is pretty bad

Richard Hanania has a new article out called “How I Learned to Love the American Empire.” He describes that around 2021 he was a big noninterventionist but has, since then, shifted to be more of a fan of U.S. empire. My shift was the opposite; around 2021, I was a relatively apolitical moderate liberal without strong views on foreign policy. I have now shifted to think that the U.S. is a grave threat to world peace with a horrible ineffective murderous foreign policy.

My case against interventionist foreign policy has quite a few moving parts to it but the short version is easy to summarize. First, I think that if one examines the historical record, the U.S. has lots of utterly indefensible interventions and pretty few that are clearly good. We raze entire countries on a whim like Laos and Cambodia, we arm many of the worst violators of human rights like the Saudis today or the Indonesians under Suharto and we frequently starve millions of people with our sanctions. In contrast, the best U.S. interventions aren’t even clearly good—I think the intervention in Korea was probably the best post-World War 2 intervention, but even that wasn’t clearly good.

Second, there’s a broad theoretical reason to expect this. Foreigners can’t vote and many of the countries that America razes are ones Americans never hear about. Lots of Americans don’t know that Laos is a country, much less where it is, much less that we vaporized about a tenth of their population during the Vietnam war, leaving about a third of their country currently uninhabitable. There’s a political incentive for politicians to act tough or do something, regardless of whether that something has any hope of working. Politicians admit openly that they favor U.S. foreign policy only supporting U.S. interests and they’re lobbied by weapons firms, so it’s no surprise that they’d support vicious militarism in pursuit of some hazy conception of U.S. interests. Foreign policy is the area where our politicians are most beholden to special interests with misaligned incentives, and it’s thus no surprise that the U.S. regularly dispenses death and destruction to significant chunks of the world.

Third, there is in the attitudes of both U.S. foreign policy planners and voters a peculiar moral blindness wherein we regard the lives of Americans as more significant and harms to the U.S. as more drastic. 9/11 is regarded as an event of singular horror, while the U.S. routinely carries out far more destructive attacks on other countries with impunity. The war on terror, for instance, killed hundreds of times more people than 9/11, yet many would have supported it if it had stopped another 9/11. As Chomsky has noted on more than one occasion, we call it terrorism when the other guys do it and counterterror when we do. If the tens of thousands of people we’d killed when Bill Clinton bombed one of Sudan’s two medical facilities were Americans, it would be regarded as one of the worst crimes in our history, rather than an insignificant footnote brushed off as the U.S. blundering in its pursuit of the good.

This fact alone is enough to indict almost all of our foreign policy. For we’d conduct almost none of it if the victims were U.S. citizens. Would we have invaded Laos or Vietnam or Cambodia if the victims were U.S. citizens? Would we arm the Saudis to the hilt as they pulverize Yemen if Yemen were part of the U.S.? Would we aid Egypt as it carries out brutal repression if the victims of that repression were U.S. citizens? Would we impose smothering sanctions on Iraq if the hundreds of thousands of people that were killed were U.S. citizens?

It’s easy to see the horrors of foreign policy if you imagine how you’d feel about some policy if it was carried out by some foreign government against your own. If some U.S. state passed some laws that were genuinely repressive, would you support China overthrowing it by force? Of course not, that would work disastrously. Yet that is how much of the world views our interventions.

Hanania notes that the world has gotten dramatically more peaceful and claims “There are two main theories that try to explain the relative peace we’ve seen since the end of WWII. One can believe that it is the result of US hegemony, or it is something else in our economics, ideas, technology, or culture that has changed.” But this is true only in the sense that there are two types of people—the Irish and everyone else. There are, in fact, a whole host of theories purporting to explain why the world is getting more peaceful including the spread of better ideas as a result of liberalism, greater prevalence of nuclear weapons, trade interdependence, changing global demographics wherein people are getting older, various international institutions, and the spread of Democracies that are much less likely to go to war. Each of these theories have independent motivations—trading partners don’t go to war, nuclear weapons deter great power war, and Pinker has extensively documented dramatically shifting ideas.

One reason to be skeptical that U.S. hegemony is the cause of the decline in conflict is that pretty much everything has been getting better! It’s not just conflict that’s dropped—as Pinker shows in his book The Better Angels of our Nature, we’ve gotten less poor, hungry, and uncivilized. Looking for some specific explanation of this particular trend is misguided when other things that have nothing to do with U.S. hegemony are also improving, like global poverty.

I used to think it was plausible that U.S. hegemony was the main cause of greater peace. But then I read this extremely convincing piece by Fettweis. Fettweis notes several facts that are discordant with the hegemony causes peace hypothesis.

First, various places where the U.S. has largely withdrawn from have displayed the same trends. In Latin American, as well as much of the global south, the U.S. hasn’t been much of a player since the end of the Cold War. Still, things have progressed just as they have in other places. The main areas that have displayed significant conflict have been in the Middle East, where the U.S. has maintained quite a significant role.

Second, the U.S. has had a wildly inconsistent policy towards much of the world without the areas where we’ve intervened showing greater peace. Fettweis notes:

In much of the rest of the world, the United States has not been especially eager to enforce any particular rules. Even rather incontrovertible evidence of genocide has not been enough to inspire action. Washington’s intervention choices have at best been erratic; Libya and Kosovo brought about action, but much more blood flowed uninterrupted in Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, Sri Lanka, and Syria. The US record of peacemaking is not exactly a long uninterrupted string of successes. During the turn-of-the-century conventional war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, a highlevel US delegation containing former and future National Security Advisors (Anthony Lake and Susan Rice) made a half-dozen trips to the region, but was unable to prevent either the outbreak or recurrence of the conflict. Lake and his team shuttled back and forth between the capitals with some frequency, and President Clinton made repeated phone calls to the leaders of the respective countries, offering to hold peace talks in the United States, all to no avail.67 The war ended in late 2000 when Ethiopia essentially won, and it controls the disputed territory to this day. The Horn of Africa is hardly the only region where states are free to fight one another today without fear of serious US involvement. Since they are choosing not to do so with increasing frequency, something else is probably affecting their calculations.

Stability exists even in those places where the potential for intervention by the sheriff is minimal. Hegemonic stability can only take credit for influencing those decisions that would have ended in war without the presence, whether physical or psychological, of the United States. It seems hard to make the case that the relative peace that has descended on so many regions is primarily due to the kind of heavy hand of the neoconservative leviathan, or its lighter, more liberal cousin. Something else appears to be at work.

Third, there have been periods when the U.S. cut military spending and played a less active role in the world. During the Clinton administration, for example, U.S. military spending dropped by 25%. Yet despite this, there was no uptick in conflict, nor did conflict increase in later years. Under both Bushs, the U.S. became more militarily involved in the world and yet there was no greater stability. Obama choose not to intervene in Syria, and both he and Clinton were less interventionist, yet that did not lead to an increase in global conflict. From these facts, Fettweis concludes:

As it stands, the only evidence we have regarding the relationship between US power and international stability suggests that the two are unrelated. The rest of the world appears quite capable and willing to operate effectively without the presence of a global policeman. Those who think otherwise have precious little empirical support upon which to build their case. Hegemonic stability is a belief, in other words, rather than an established fact, and as such deserves a different kind of examination.

Hanania notes that if the U.S. is a hegemon then, just as when a policeman jails people that means things have gone poorly, U.S. punitiveness can serve a role even if things get worse when the U.S. intervenes. U.S. intervention works because it deters conflict. He says:

In early 2020, I wrote a report on how economic sanctions don’t work, based on the history of how they have been used. However, the more that I’ve thought about the issue, the more I’ve come to realize that this is like looking at the people in jail and concluding that the criminal justice system doesn’t prevent crime, since it didn’t work on the population being studied. You don’t check whether laws against murder are effective only by studying murderers, and you likewise can’t judge the effectiveness of economic sanctions by looking at outlier regimes only, which can be considered a classic case of the availability bias.

It is true that Kim Jung Un does not do what the United States wants after it has sanctioned him, but when countries are punished for doing things like violating human rights or building nuclear weapons, the hope is that this can deter other states. This is a very obvious objection to my old argument on sanctions, but I missed it or didn’t appreciate it enough, probably due to motivated reasoning.

Deterrence is a good explanation of why we don’t see more dysfunctional behavior in the international system, but the way this works is by necessity mostly unobservable. If we woke up tomorrow and found out that, say, Cambodia had invaded and annexed Thailand, there would be a global consensus around sanctioning Cambodia, making it an international pariah, and sending arms to whoever in Thailand is willing to resist their new occupiers.

Whether this is true of sanctions is contestable. I haven’t delved deeply into the empirical literature on this question, but one of the few studies I could find found empirically that they had a fairly small deterrent effect. In the absence of strong empirical evidence for the success of sanctions, it’s not worth killing hundreds of thousands of people. In fact, even if they did make war less likely, they kill enough people to not generally be worth it.

Furthermore, there are all sorts of ways sanctions could backfire. U.S. sanctions leave people poor and less able to rebel, as well as strengthening ties between autocracies. Hanania has a piece finding that sanctions aren’t effective at getting countries to follow our directions and deposing regimes. But if dictators are no more likely to be deposed in the presence of sanctions, what deterrent are they serving?

And the broader hypothesis that interventions mainly serve a deterrent role is wrong. If it were right, the regions and time periods in which the U.S. intervenes more would be disproportionately peaceful. In reality, we find the opposite, as Fettweis shows.

The U.S. hasn’t been an effective deterrer of atrocities given that we’re allies with many of those carrying out the atrocities. As the Saudis continue to turn Yemen to ash, we arm them—some deterrent. The U.S. is just as willing to sell arms to those who violate human rights and accept them as our allies. It’s not an effective deterrent when we sometimes finance atrocities and other times selectively oppose them. We’ve done nothing, to take a recent example, as Azerbaijan commits its crimes against Armenians. As Fettweis sanotes ys “Washington’s intervention choices have at best been erratic; Libya and Kosovo brought about action, but much more blood flowed uninterrupted in Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, Sri Lanka, and Syria.”

Hanania’s next point is that “Autocrats are much dumber (or at least misaligned) than I previously thought.” I’m not sure why this vindicates U.S. empire. What’s the connection between autocratic stupidity and U.S. interventions being desirable? Everyone’s against autocracy—but U.S. policy often results in instability and props up dangerous autocracies.

His final claim is that the success of the Trump administration shows that an interventionist foreign policy can work. Trump did crazy shit like assassinating Solmeini, and yet it worked according to Hanania. Hanania’s evidence for the great success was the Abraham Accords, which he claims were revolutionary.

I don’t agree that the Abraham accords were, in fact, a huge deal. Getting a few minor countries to recognize Israel may have some value, but it’s not clear that it was worth it. And how did Trump’s policy of doing things like assassinating Solmeini facilitate that? Furthermore, civilian deaths increased under Trump, mostly in the Middle East, showing that his foreign policy was a failure, not a success. When the U.S. assassinates with impunity, it leads much of the world to regard us the way we’d regard China if they started randomly assassinating heads of western countries.

Hanania claims that Hamas wouldn’t have attacked under Trump. I have no idea why he thinks this. Hamas doesn’t seem to care much about the deaths of its citizens and knew that there would be devastating Israeli reprisal. It’s not at all clear why a Trump presidency would change that.

Hanania suggests that the U.S. should pressure other countries to adopt economically liberal policies. He never describes how we should do this. There are three options:

1. Sanctions: these seem like a nonstarter given their devastating economic ramifications and countries tendency to ignore them.

2. Wars: bad idea! We should not invade countries just because they adopt left-wing policies.

3. Threatening to end arms sales: this seems like a non-crazy idea. Still, I don’t know why we’d expect foreign policy planners from half the world away to be effective at planning the economy of a far-away country. Plus, this would be a move towards less interventionism, where right now we sell things pretty much indiscriminately.

Hanania arges that the main error of the Bush era regime change wars was that trying to force Democracy on other countries doesn’t work. But I think the broadest lesson is that regime change works best when it comes inside rather than from outside proxies. The best way to get America to become more libertarian wouldn’t be for Luxembourg to back proxies to wage violent war in America. Heavy-handed interventions tend to fail, even if their goal is to make countries more economically free.

Hanania distinguishes the order-preserving interventions that he’d support from the chaos-causing actions supported by other presidents. He claims we should back rebels in Iran, for instance, while opposing interventions in Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan. But why is Iran special? Why should we arm rebels in Iran but not the others? It’s not clear.

The lesson of history has been that the U.S., rated by people around the world as the most significant threat to global peace, does not have a good track record in terms of interventions. Trying to overthrow a government to get something better rarely gets something better. As Scott Alexander says:

The general picture is of a third world country that was previously in a fragile social equilibrium. Something disrupts the equilibrium – usually the United States toppling the government because Communists were starting to do well in elections. It is replaced by a weak central government insecure in its power which decides to go after mass movements it perceives as a threat.

The mass movements form guerilla groups to resist government brutality. Supporters of the government form death squads in order to kill suspected guerillas more unethically than the international community would allow the government to do directly. Eventually there is so much violence that anyone who can form a guerilla army and kill their enemies before their enemies kill them does so.

The dictator solemnly declares that what’s going on is a rebellion by communist extremists with associated counter-violence by some grassroots rightist extremists, while he, the dictator, is doing his best to keep the peace. He send in the army, who are secretly or not-so-secretly are also the death squads, and so just make things worse. The United States declares the dictator is a great man who does his best to maintain peace in a troubled nation, and sends him tons of weapons and money. All of these weapons and money mysteriously end up in the hands of the death squads, which of course means the United States has to send in more weapons and money to help the dictator deal with the new threat of these richer, better-armed enemies.

If the dictator is feeling really nice, he will hold an election. The mass movements, communists, and anyone with actual popular support will be banned from participating since they are violent extremists, and the death squads will kill anybody who campaigns against the dictator. The dictator will win the vote handily, and the Free World will declare that since he won the elections, it’s clear that the communists are just violent extremists trying to deny the will of the people and take over for their own nefarious purposes.

This pattern, with slight variation, seems to have happened across the entire Third World at one point or another. Perhaps there will be another coup, and the dictator will be replaced by another dictator, perhaps some foreign country will get directly involved on one side or the other, but the basic logic will not change. For a space of years to decades, tens of thousands of people will be tortured and killed – a few here and there by the communists, but most by the government. Whole villages will be destroyed, freedom of thought will be nonexistent, and everyone except the dictator and a few cronies will be constantly living in fear.

And in a sense, I already knew all of this. We all kind of understand what goes on in banana republics. But for some reason, Manufacturing Consent painted an unusually clear picture that knocked it into relief for me and changed my understanding of a lot of things.

Take, for instance, the second Iraq War. The hawkish position is “we were right to want to remove Saddam, a bad man. We were right to believe that we would win the shooting war quickly and easily. We just couldn’t have predicted the explosion of Sunni-Shiite violence that would erupt afterwards, and that’s not our fault.”

And yet now that I have read Manufacturing Consent, it seems obvious that removing Saddam would cause Iraq to descend into blood-soaked death squads. It is like a law of the universe that Third World countries will descend into blood-soaked death squads at the drop of a pin. Every time the United States has tried to change the government of a Third World nation, the end result has been blood-soaked death squads. Expecting to remove a regime from power without thinking about the blood-soaked death squads seems less like an excusable error and more like missing the very heart of the issue, like expecting to use a nuke without thinking about radiation damage.

But the dove position is almost as bad! It’s “Ha! The hawks thought we would be greeted as liberators! What morons!” This totally misses the point! It’s assuming that if the Iraqis liked us, they would have politely lined up to form a centralized democratic government with a monopoly on the use of force. The problem wasn’t that the Iraqis didn’t like us enough, it was that we did something in a Third World country and expected it not to descend into blood-soaked death squads. That never works.

Hanania’s view seems to be “let’s just intervene when the things we’re pursuing are actually good like capitalism and economic freedom.” No! It never works. It always descends back to the blood-soaked death squads.